Among the well-known names no longer living in Israel are the curator and art theoretician Ariella Azoulay and her partner, philosopher Adi Ophir, who was among the founders of the 21st Year, an anti-occupation organization, and refused to serve in the territories; Anat Biletzki, a former chairwoman of B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories; Dana Golan, former executive director of the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence; planner and architect Haim Yacobi, who founded Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights; literary scholar Hannan Hever, a cofounder of the 21st Year who was active in Yesh Gvul, Ilan Pappe, a one-time candidate from the Arab-Jewish party Hadash and a member of the group of “new historians,” who left the country over a decade ago and lives in London; and Yonatan Shapira, a former pilot in the Israeli air force who initiated the 2003 letter of the pilots who refused to participate in attacks in the occupied territories, and took part in protest flotillas to the Gaza Strip.
"Tel Aviv today is far more white and European than Berlin. My real cultural exile was in Israel.”
Rozeen Bisharat and Saar Székely, who are life partners, despaired of Israel at a younger age than the other interviewees, but even so, they felt they had to leave fast. Székely, who is Jewish, and Bisharat, who is Palestinian, erected “Tent 48” on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, in an effort to raise awareness of the Nakba. Székely was an activist via political performance art. They left Israel two-and-a-half years ago. “For years I thought it was possible to generate change in Israeli society, to bring people content they hadn’t been exposed to,” she says. “But having a different opinion started to be considered treason. Automatically, if you don’t agree with the state’s way, you are a traitor. And I, as a Palestinian, was told: ‘You don’t like it? Go to Gaza.’ There’s no one to hold a discussion with. Not even in Tel Aviv. Part of my leaving was a desire to liberate myself from my role as ‘a Palestinian in Tel Aviv.’ In Berlin I am from the Middle East, or part of the Arab world. I am not a gimmick the way I was in Tel Aviv, but one of hundreds of thousands of other foreigners. Berlin gives me access to the Arab world, I can meet Syrians, Egyptians and Lebanese, I can be Middle Eastern. Tel Aviv today is far more white and European than Berlin. My real cultural exile was in Israel.”
"My French friends complain about racism in that country, but we are talking a whole different scale from Israel.”
“I did not have a golden parachute of work in academia like some others had,” says Yael Lerer, 53, a translator and editor who spearheaded attempts to draw Israelis and Palestinians closer together from a civic and cultural point of view. Lerer, who moved to Paris in 2008, was a central activist in the Equality Alliance, an Arab-Jewish political movement out of which emerged Balad (acronym for National Democratic Alliance), later serving as the party’s spokesperson, parliamentary assistant to MK Azmi Bishara and as Balad’s first election campaign manager. She founded Andalus Publishing. Lerer has lived in Paris for more than a decade. In 2013, Lerer returned to Israel for a time and was a Knesset candidate on behalf of Balad, in the 12th (and unrealistic) place on its list. While taking part in a panel discussion ahead of the election at Netanya Academic College, she was the target of a violent attack by rightists. The other panel participants did not come to her defense, she says.
“It was almost a lynching,” she recalls. “It’s a lucky thing there were security guards. I’d always thought that even if I received hate messages and threats of murder, it would only be on the web, but that in real life no one would do anything really bad to me. Suddenly I understood that I could no longer count on that. I understood that Israel had become a dangerous place for me.”
After losing hope for change, top left-wing activists and scholars leave Israel behind - Israel News - Haaretz.com
